Right In Your Face, America

    Paul Ryan's Vicious Budget

By Ralph Nader
Counterpunch Weekend Edition
August 17-19, 2012

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/17/paul-ryans-vicious-budget/

The cruel impoverishment of the debate among the
presidential and congressional candidates took a
gigantic leap into the pits with Mitt Romney's
selection of 42-year-old Rep. Paul Ryan from the
deindustrialized town of Janesville, Wisconsin. Ryan
is invariably described by reporters as "an
intellectual leader of the conservative movement"
and by fellow Republicans as a person "who tells the
hard truths" to the American people.

The truth is that what has distinguished this fast-
talking, glib, Ayn Rand-smitten, congenial young
man is that he has a plan for the federal budget. On
Capitol Hill that fact alone makes one a "stand-out"
in the field of political narcissists whose mental
tank harbors gaseous one-liners and kneejerk
slogans.

The Ryan budget plan is a Koch brothers' dream
and the American peoples' nightmare. It leads with a
lie - namely to control deficit spending by
continuing it for at least 30 more years before his
concoction of big tax cuts for the rich, further
increases in the already bloated defense budget, and
savage cuts in public services for the people,
somehow balance the budget around mid-century.

Ryan's brain is chock-full of such cognitive
dissonance that it would blow a normal person's
mind. He is a practicing Catholic, but since his
youth has been a disciple of the militant atheist Ayn
Rand who despised altruism and "love thy neighbor"
values while edifying extreme selfishness and greed.

His plan for social security is social insecurity. Make
people work longer before receiving curtailed
benefits, invest trillions of dollars of these funds in
the volatile stock market and make sure that rich
people only have to pay social security taxes on a
fraction of their earned income.

He would open the floodgates on future Medicare to
the rapacious health insurance companies through
a voucher system whereby the elderly are fed to
these sharks with ever-higher co-pays. His "block
grant plan alone would lead states to drop between
14 and 27 million people (the poor and those with
disabilities) from Medicaid by 2021," according to
the Urban Institute.

As a 16-year-old youngster, Ryan and his family
were helped by social security when his father
passed away. So why now impose this draconian
crunch on these three major programs? Ryan says
that this is the only way to preserve social security,
Medicare and Medicaid for future generations. Very
well, Mr. Ryan, then why have you refused to civilly
debate your proposals and their consequences with
any of your critics inside and outside the Congress
before a national television audience?

I requested that you have this important exchange
in three letters (see Nader.org). Finally, your office
demurred on the grounds that you were too busy.
Are you really too busy to debate your plan which
has passed the Republican-controlled House of
Representatives and has been generally endorsed by
Mitt Romney? Or are you too fearful of trying to
defend your numbers and their plutocratic values to
the likes of Princeton professor and Nobel Laureate
Paul Krugman, who has called the Ryan budget "the
most fraudulent in American history"?

Cognitive dissonance proliferates. His hometown
has been devastated by pull-down trade agreements
yet he supports NAFTA and the World Trade
Organization. He sees himself as a fiscal hawk while
being an armchair warrior and military hawk (he
wants to stay and win in Afghanistan). He offers "to
restore the dreams and greatness of America" but
opposes both public works projects to repair
America and environmental health standards so
Americans can breathe, drink, eat and work more
safely.

He proposes deep cuts in widespread hunger
alleviating food stamps. He opposes the minimum
wage while he fights to eliminate or reduce taxes on
capital gains and other taxes on the already
undertaxed very-wealthy who have poured money
into his and other Republicans' campaign kitties.

He professes to be against crony capitalism, but he
voted for the giant Wall Street bailouts and other
bailouts and giveaways that define what real
conservatives find so offensive.

An outraged David A. Stockman, President Reagan's
first director of the Office of Management and
Budget, dismisses Ryan's conservative credentials.
He said that Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover,
Senator Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and
even Gerald A. Ford "would have had no use for the
neoconservative imperialism."

"In short," wrote Stockman in The New York Times,
"Mr. Ryan's plan is devoid of credible math or hard
policy choices.. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no
plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-
industrial complex, social insurance or the nation's
fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist
prosperity - just empty sermons."

So Mr. Ryan is a closet corporatist who won't even
urge cracking down on the hundreds of billions of
dollars that companies defraud the federal
government every year, including documented fraud
on Medicare, Medicaid and the Defense Department.

If the Democrats can't use the Ryan budget as their
ticket to victory this November in Congress and the
White House, then they are truly the terminally
decaying party of caution, cash and cowardliness.

In reality, the Ryan budget, thrown right in the face
of the American people, is the ultimate test of what's
left of the Democrats besides their donkey.
_______________

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and
author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a
contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the
Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless
is also available in a Kindle edition.

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